And Dennis himself had colluded with that evil, if passively, giving her permission to adopt and to damage, indifferent to anything but outward respectability and success. I found it impossible to reconcile that knowledge with the other man I’d heard about, that regular visitor to the Southfield Unit who’d sent Rebecca presents every week. Perhaps he’d simply been driven by guilt, a desire to atone…but I couldn’t imagine those emotions existing in that chilly and joyless mind, no matter how hard I tried. It was the only aspect of Rebecca’s life that I still didn’t understand, and the realisation tormented me with a thousand lingering questions; discovery wasn’t over yet, could never be complete till they were answered.
I got off at Bournemouth station, heading for the multi-storey—the chilly bleakness inside vanished the second I drove out, and heavy gold warmth replaced it. Checking the dashboard clock, I saw the time was half past six, and was relieved to know I’d be home a good hour before Carl. Disturbing as it had felt at the time, I’d done the right thing in sneaking off to London without letting him know—I wouldn’t have sacrificed that day’s revelations for anything.
Beyond Wareham’s town centre, I turned onto Ploughman’s Lane and started up the hill. After the events of that day, the peace was indescribably soothing—grass ruffling in a slight breeze, a bird singing all alone. The serenity turned my restlessness down to a sub-audible murmur, amplifying a sense that Rebecca’s darkness was very far away, that Donald Hargreaves had been describing events from another world.
Rosy-blue sky extended ahead as I approached the crest of the hill.
In the split second that descent began, shock stabbed me in the heart. Two police cars were parked outside the white house in the distance, blue lights dead, surreal and nightmarish in the gentle evening light. Something’s happened to Liz was my first terrified thought, but as I got closer, I saw she was deep in conversation with a uniformed officer in my open front doorway. Then I saw the jagged viciousness of broken glass round the edges of the ground floor windows, saw the living room curtains flapping out in a sudden breeze.
‘My God.’ Slamming the car door behind me, I raced towards them. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Oh, Anna, I’m so terribly sorry.’ It was Liz who answered. She was deathly pale, and sympathy and horror combined in her expression. ‘When I got home from work about an hour ago, I saw someone had broken into your house—they’d gone, of course, but I called the police straight away. Your front door was wide open.’
My thought processes felt dazed and sluggish as I turned my gaze to the door itself. Its large panel of frosted glass had been shattered, too—the glass around the edges had been removed with a little more care than that at the windows, scraped away so an unknown arm could reach in, unlock. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I said. ‘I didn’t use the mortice lock. When I went out, I just left it on the Yale—I didn’t even think—’
‘I wouldn’t upset yourself about it, Mrs Howell.’ The policeman must have got my name from Liz; he was youngish, blondish. ‘That wouldn’t have mattered. A determined enough burglar could have climbed in through one of the windows just as easily. Without a burglar alarm, they’d have had an easy time doing it, especially with your neighbour out all day.’
‘We’ve never even talked about getting a burglar alarm. We never thought…the area seemed so peaceful.’ My voice sounded strange to my own ears, flat and drugged. What should have been my first thought occurred to me out of nowhere, and I spoke more sharply. ‘What have they taken?’
‘There was no way we could tell, I’m afraid. Not till you came back. We’ve got two officers dusting for fingerprints at the moment. If you’d like to look around, let me know what’s missing…’
The rest of his sentence faded into the distance behind me as I stepped into the living room. A familiar domestic setting had become a war zone, broken glass glittering in piles and shards and occasional specks that caught the light like diamonds. This was home only this morning, I thought, I’ll wake up in bed and it won’t have happened at all, and I realised what a cliché it was to think that, I’d never have let a character of mine think it in a million years. Behind the dead nothing, hysteria rose like bile; I clapped my hand to my mouth as if to suppress vomit rather than giggles, swallowing them, forcing them back down.
‘Mrs Howell?’ the young policeman said behind me. ‘Can you tell me what’s been stolen?’
I stood and looked as if I’d never seen this place before and had no idea what should be where. A single glaring absence reminded me abruptly: the empty shelf where the Tiffany lamp had stood. I closed my eyes and saw the room as it had been. ‘Our lamp’s gone,’ I said in a flat, blank voice I’d never heard before. ‘My husband bought it. It’s not real Tiffany, but it’s very nice.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’ His tone was both dubious and indulgent, deliberately understanding the eccentricities of shock. ‘Is there anything else?’
‘The DVD player. The stereo.’ I saw their absence without surprise. My gaze returned to the shelf like a magnet to true north; I remembered Carl unwrapping something in the kitchen during our first week here, and felt nothing. ‘They don’t really matter, they’re insured. It’s just the lamp. My husband bought it from an antiques shop. He thought I’d like it.’
‘Surprising the burglars didn’t help themselves to the telly while they were here.’ His brisk, jovial voice dragged my attention towards the corner, where the huge widescreen set was apparently undamaged. ‘Well, thank the Lord for small mercies. It looks like a good one.’
I barely heard him—as he spoke, I was approaching the kitchen with slow sleepwalker’s steps that clearly mirrored my state of mind. The back windows had been smashed as well. Glass crunched under my feet. Through the window frames, past the jagged shards that still clung to their edges, the back garden extended unchanged, serene in the summer evening.
‘Your microwave looks like a write-off,’ the policeman was saying. ‘It might have been accidentally smashed by whatever they used to break the windows. Whatever it was, they took it with them when they left. Of course, there’s nothing to rule out deliberate vandalism. From the look of it, their tastes certainly ran that way.’
The words meant nothing to me. Deep inside, I could feel the thick numbing ice of shock beginning to melt around something else—something dark and rotted and terrible trapped inside it, something I didn’t want to see. ‘Mrs Howell?’ the voice asked loudly. ‘I asked you if there was anything missing from this room?’
My gaze panned across devastation, elements of familiarity grotesque in this new context; A Mind To Murder had gone, I saw. It had been by the fruit bowl when I’d left that morning, had been there for weeks. I found myself staring at the fruit bowl itself, a surreal still life in a war-torn landscape. Broken glass had fallen across the table. Tiny shards glinted up from the apples and oranges and bananas. We’ll have to throw them out, I thought randomly, they’ll never be safe to eat now, and, as I thought it, I felt the shock-ice melt a little more.
‘Mrs Howell?’
The voice again, slightly impatient this time. I pulled myself back to reality; everything felt so wrong, as though I’d been dislocated from the world. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter, really.’ Realising that he was looking at me oddly, I struggled to think of what he’d expect me to say. ‘Have they been upstairs at all? The burglars?’
‘Well, your bedroom doesn’t appear to have been touched, which I suppose is something to be grateful for. But there’s a bit more damage up there, all the same. They seem to have vandalised your husband’s computer. Or is it yours?’
I didn’t answer—even as he spoke, I was hurrying out of the kitchen and up the stairs as fast as I could, taking two at a time. I squeezed past two uniformed strangers dusting the banisters for prints—white-gloved, patient, pernickety—and had a bizarre momentary image of the gardeners in Alice in Wonderland patiently painting the roses. It vanished as abruptly
as it had arrived. I was standing in the doorway of the spare room, my sense of unreality fading with terrifying speed.
As far as I could remember, the blinds in here had been open when I’d left the house. Now they were three-quarters drawn. Razor-thin slits of light slanted across shadowy greyness the colour of cold ashes. The monitor’s screen had been smashed, and the PC itself lay in the centre of the room, a wide crack along its creamy-grey casing, an ominous intricacy of circuits showing through. The fax machine seemed to have been attacked with even greater ferocity; it had been annihilated. And there was something very important missing. Something that had been on the bottom shelf of the desk.
‘They’ve taken my folder,’ I said tonelessly.
The policeman had followed me up without me even noticing. ‘What folder?’
His tone implied dubious eyebrows being raised at a colleague, but I couldn’t have cared less. Slow, swooning horror overcame me; Mr Wheeler’s image floated lazily to the surface of my mind, like something pale and drowned and bloated in dark water. Only when she got home from work, Maureen Evans had said to me a thousand years ago, all her windows had been smashed in. She got the police round straight away. The parallels were too close, I realised. This could be nothing but revenge.
‘What folder, Mrs Howell?’
More than anything, I wanted to tell him all about my research and my fears, but knew I couldn’t—Carl could be home any minute, and he’d tell Carl. I was almost certain the policeman wouldn’t believe me anyway, this cheerful, straightforward young policeman who hadn’t expected me to react anywhere near as strongly. From the corner of my eye, I could see him giving me an appraising, sideways glance, a look that clearly read caution, lunatic at work.
‘I don’t know,’ I said finally. ‘It doesn’t matter. Look—I’m sorry—I’ve got to sit down. I need to sit down.’
Back downstairs, in the shattered kitchen, we dusted down chairs before sitting at the table. Liz was sweeping up the shards around us with swift, practical ease. I thought of the two of us chatting over cups of tea in this very room, and realised I was crying; the policeman sat stiff and awkward as the tears came, but Liz hurried over, laying down her dustpan and brush.
‘Come on, now, Anna,’ she coaxed, putting an arm round my shoulder. ‘Don’t cry. It’s not the end of the world.’
‘We’ll do our very best to catch the people responsible, Mrs Howell,’ the policeman said. ‘I’m sure you know how hard it is to solve this sort of crime, but you can rest assured that we’ll try our hardest.’
I broke off crying with a hoarse, unladylike snort, from embarrassment more than anything else. Across the table, the policeman spoke more gently as Liz released my shoulder. ‘What time is your husband due back from work?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, sniffing. ‘Any time now.’
‘Well, we’d better stay and speak to him as well. We certainly don’t mean to intrude, Mrs Howell, but it’s obvious you’re very shocked.’
I longed to tell him why, but knew that anything I said would be anxiously passed on to Carl; I could tell that the policeman envisioned him as a potential oasis of sanity and rationality, as though he was my guardian rather than my husband. Seconds unwound, in which I bludgeoned my mind for the right words. Finally, I found something that wasn’t a secret from either Carl or Liz, that still cast new light on events.
‘This happened to the woman who lived here before us, you know,’ I said to the policeman, making a huge effort to sound as reasonable as I could. ‘She had her windows smashed too, every one.’
I couldn’t quite keep the quiver of fear out of my voice and was appalled to see him smiling indulgently. ‘Oh, I know what happened. You must think this house is jinxed—but you don’t have to worry about that. That incident had nothing to do with burglary. I can’t talk about it in detail as I’m sure you understand, but it was very much a personal matter. In your case, we’re looking at simple robbery and vandalism. Teenagers, maybe. It certainly looks that way.’
He didn’t understand—but there was nothing I could say, no way I could correct him without damning myself. ‘To be honest,’ he went on, ‘a nice house like this in the country, without a burglar alarm that alerts us when it’s triggered—you’ve really been asking for trouble. I’d strongly advise you and your husband to get one fitted.’
Something maddeningly patronising in his voice forced me to speak. ‘It’s not just a burglary,’ I burst out, ‘I know it’s not. It’s connected to what happened before, to the woman who lived here then—’
Again, he looked cautious, but in completely the wrong way. He wasn’t fearing for my safety, I realised, but my sanity. ‘You haven’t received any threats since you moved in, have you?’
I was very aware of Liz’s discreet but constant presence in the room—she didn’t know about the phone calls, and God only knew what she’d think if I told this policeman now. And anything I said would be passed straight on to Carl. ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘There’s been nothing like that here.’
‘Well, Mrs Howell, there were certainly previous threats made last time. Letters, silent phone calls, that sort of thing. The two incidents are completely unrelated—I can give you my word on it.’
I barely took in the last half of his sentence at all—Rebecca had received the phone calls, too, only Maureen’s son-in-law hadn’t known or hadn’t told her. For a second, I thought I was about to black out. The parallels weren’t just close, they were virtually identical. Mr Wheeler was trying to drive me out, as she’d been driven out herself—
The door leading on to the hallway was open, the front door ajar beyond that. I saw and heard Carl’s Audi turning into the drive. Across the table, the policeman spoke with thinly veiled relief ‘Well, Mrs Howell. Looks like your husband’s home.’
‘The emergency glaziers shouldn’t be too long now,’ Carl said, as he laid the cup of tea down by my unmoving hand. ‘They’ll be here soon, they said.’
It was eight thirty in the evening, and the police had left some time ago. Outside, it was starting to get dark. We were still in the kitchen, where the worst of the damage had been cleared away—he’d swept up most of the glass with Liz’s help before she’d gone home, offering to stay, urging us to let her know if we needed anything. He’d thanked her profusely, but I’d been in no state to do or say anything very much; my own words of gratitude had sounded wooden, scripted.
It was amazing how often the same thing could slam into your mind with fresh shock—every few minutes, the enormity of what had happened struck me. How alien everything looked now, felt now. Even now the piles of glass were gone, I still saw tiny glints of it winking up at me from odd places. Or perhaps I imagined them; I couldn’t be sure. Carl had rolled the blinds down in front of empty frames, and they rattled intermittently in the breeze—it had been warm two hours ago, was now chilly, insistent.
I picked up the cup of tea with both hands and sipped at it like medicine. ‘Thanks,’ I said quietly, setting it down again.
‘Come on, Annie. It’s all right now.’ He came over to the table as Liz had done earlier, putting his hands on my shoulders; it should have felt reassuring, but didn’t at all. ‘It was just a burglary, at the end of the day. It happens to just about everyone sooner or later. We got broken into when I was a kid. We were on holiday in Spain at the time, got home to find half our stuff gone.’
If only it had just been a burglary, if only it had—the words caught in my throat as he spoke again, resigned, good-natured, practical. ‘Everything’s insured, everything that matters, anyway… Christ alone knows what they wanted with some of the stuff they took. That old camera I had in the hallway cabinet, the clock radio in the spare room—we’d have been lucky to get five quid for them at a car boot sale. For both of them.’ Breaking off for a second, he smiled ruefully. ‘Still, it’s a bloody nuisance. I could kick myself for not getting a burglar alarm fitted—I didn’t even think about it. Don’t worry, Annie. I’ll find
out about getting one first thing tomorrow. This time next week, the place’ll be like Fort Knox.’
I found it terrible to watch his misplaced reassurance, knowing he had no idea what there really was to be worried about. Suddenly I longed to tell him the truth, all of it. Even if it made him furiously angry, I thought, it had to be better than this; the weight of secret and solitary knowledge had never been heavier. I felt it pressing down on me, and forced myself to speak.
‘Carl, I don’t think this was just a burglary.’
He looked at me strangely. ‘Of course it was,’ he said, ‘what do you mean?’
‘Well…’
My voice tailed off before he spoke again. ‘Come on, Annie—tell me, for God’s sake. What are you talking about?’
The words were angry, but the tone was just concerned, slightly worried, and it seemed to give me the final push I needed. I reached the brink of confession for the hundredth time, but, instead of backing away fearfully as I’d done before, I positioned myself on its furthest edge and jumped into empty air. ‘It’s because of my research,’ I said. ‘I’m sure of it.’
Still he watched me, and I couldn’t read his expression. I went on, trying to speak slowly, calmly. ‘What I’ve been finding out about Rebecca’s life…well, a while ago, I went to interview a vet who knew her while she lived here. Mr Wheeler, his name was, apparently they’d been close friends. It was terrible. As soon as I told him I wanted to find out about her, he just launched into this outburst, thought I was asking because I was ghoulish, callous, gloating over the details of her being driven out. Remember that collar we found in the cupboard? He said someone had killed her dog to make her leave. Anyway, he was furious. Practically threw me out of his surgery. Didn’t even give me the chance to explain that I wasn’t like that, he was wrong—’
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